Ex-astronaut fits the bill at Lowell textile museum

By John Collins, jcollins@lowellsun.com

Updated:
01/07/2013 08:25:19 AM EST

LOWELL -- No one has ever traveled farther before landing in Lowell.

Or been more perfectly suited for his assigned task.

Retired NASA astronaut Dan Barry, who logged 734 hours in space aboard the shuttles Endeavor and Discovery, and who gained further notoriety as a contestant on the CBS-TV reality series Survivor, will be the featured speaker at Tuesday's grand opening of a space-related traveling exhibition at the American Textile History Museum, at 491 Dutton St., Lowell.

The museum's special event, "Suited for Space: A stunning journey into the evolution of the spacesuit," includes free tours of the exhibit developed by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, from 3:30-6:30 p.m., followed by an opportunity to meet and hear a talk by Barry, 59, a veteran of three space-shuttle flights from 1996 to 2001, including spacewalks totaling more than 25 hours.

For his talk, titled "The Sensations of a Space Flight," Barry plans to wear an article of clothing he wore previously on one of his shuttle missions. Most likely, he said it will be a 100 percent cotton T-shirt, rather than one of NASA's bulky, signature spacesuits that often leave bruises on the astronauts who wear them.

In a phone interview from his South Hadley home, Barry said his talk will include "what it feels like to get on a vehicle and have a controlled detonation underneath you that slams you back in your seat and eight minutes later leaves you floating.

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It's really a serene, kind of beautiful thing."

During his Lowell visit, Barry also promised to discuss another other-worldly topic he's passionate about, and which many attending his talks find more fascinating than his description of space travel -- and it's not his six-episode run on Survivor, Panama: Exile Island in 2005.

Barry said believes the human race ought to prioritize setting up an independent colony of our species on Mars, before it's too late.

A Mars mission "is really the most important thing we can do in space right now," Barry said.

"One reason is, Mars is the place where we've got a good shot of finding life that's independent of life on Earth. If we can do that -- demonstrate for sure there was a different type of life on Mars that occurred independently in two different places -- then it's all over the galaxy, and it's just a matter of looking hard enough to find each form of life that has got to be out there."

On the other hand, if there is zero evidence there was ever life on Mars, it would indicate the rarity of life on Earth and the more pressing need to preserve it elsewhere, Barry theorizes.

If not asked about Mars by an audience member during one of his public appearances, he often brings up the topic himself, Barry said.

"Right now, one event can kill everybody -- asteroid, ecological runaway, some weird bio-thing -- everybody's in the same basket here," Barry said. "But if we have a colony on Mars, there's no one event that can wipe out our species ever again. ... By going to Mars and establishing a colony independent of the Earth -- it's within our grasp, it's really just a matter of political will to do that -- we ensure the immortality of the human species."

But back to more earthly concerns, Barry said he won't wear one of the bulky spacesuits.

"There's two different spacesuits we wear: One is for launch and entry, and is actually pretty comfortable when you're in a normal phase of flight and it's not inflated," Barry said. "But the EMU (extra-vehicular mobility unit) is pretty uncomfortable because, when it gets inflated while you're working in it, the interior rubber bladder becomes very rigid.

"It's like you're wearing a suit that puts you inside this rock-solid structure, and you'll feel these pressure points where (the bladder) didn't get perfectly smoothed out. Think of somebody putting a knuckle in the middle of your back and just leaving it there for eight hours. It can get uncomfortable."

The astronauts' mental focus on the spacewalk's tasks at hand usually distract them from feeling the pain caused by the spacesuit, Barry said. The bruises on their bodies are only discovered later, when they get checked out by NASA's doctors on Earth.

Barry admits to not being well versed on the fabric that makes up a NASA spacesuit.

"I know there's a lot of nylon and Dacron and mixture of materials like Kevlar and aluminum foil, but you can find all that online," he said.

But he does consider the glove portion to be an engineering marvel.

"I'm outside the spacecraft, look down and at my fingertips, all that's between me and the vacuum of space is basically a very thin, rubbery material, maybe an eighth-inch thick, if that, and yet they were able to make them safe but still flexible and thin enough so you can grab tools and retain some feel. That's a real engineering achievement. That's what impressed me most were the gloves."

Barry was born in Norwalk, Conn., and raised in Alexandria, La. His mother was a homemaker. His father, a salesman and plant manager of a valve-manufacturing company, died when Barry was 2. One of Barry's three older sisters married an engineer from MIT.

"He sort of became my big brother," Barry said. "He taught me about engineering and how to program computers and was really my inspiration for going into science and engineering."

Barry now calls South Hadley his hometown. His wife is a professor at nearby Mount Holyoke College. Both their son and daughter are graduate students at MIT, about to earn Ph.D.'s in computer science.

Asked whether he'd prefer to return to Survivor as a contestant for another season, say, or make his first trip to Lowell, Barry called it an easy choice.

"I really enjoyed being on Survivor, but I had the experience and I don't think I'd go back. I like to go to unusual places. So I'm looking forward to being at the Textile Museum and learning a lot of stuff I don't know about."

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